David Greenberg

Zuckerman Postdoctoral Scholar and musician Dr. David Greenberg of the Interdisciplinary Department of Social Sciences and Department of Music at Bar-Ilan University has had an incredibly productive year. His scholarly work alone includes:

3 Journal Articles and an Upcoming Book

We may pick a favorite singer because we’re attracted to their personality.
Analyzing the personalities of 80,000 fans and 50 famed musicians, Dr. Greenberg was part of a team of psychologists from four major universities that found that musical preferences are influenced by the public persona of the singer or band. “The self-congruity effect of music” was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

The article reached Rolling Stone Magazine, MSN, Yahoo, and the Bar-Ilan website.

And see an interview on ILTV Israel News with Dr. Greenberg about his research.

Your musical preferences can help predict your personality traits. 
Dr. Greenberg is also a co-author on an article, ‘Just The Way You Are’: Linking Music Listening on Spotify and Personality, that investigates the link between personality traits and music listening behavior. Published in Social Psychological and Personality Science, the article shows that musical preferences and habitual listening behaviors can predict the Big Five personality traits (extroversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism) with moderate to high accuracy.

Elevated autism diagnoses in transgender individuals?
A third article, in press at Nature Communications, is entitled “Elevated autism diagnoses and autistic traits in transgender individuals: a study of over 600,000 individuals.” (Dr. Greenberg is also an Honorary Research Associate at the Autism Research Centre in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge.)

Psychology and the musical mind
Dr. Greenberg recently signed a contract for an academic trade book with the prestigious Oxford University Press, due to be published in 2021. Working title: The Song is You: How Psychological Science Explains the Musical Mind.

2 Large Investigations

• Greenberg will soon be leading a randomized control trial (RCT) of musical interventions in autism. It’s a collaboration between researchers at Cambridge University, Anglia Ruskin University, and Bar-Ilan University. He and his colleague, Simon Baron-Cohen of Cambridge University (where Dr. Greenberg earned his doctorate) spent a year fundraising the £1 million they’ll need to conduct the trial.
• In another multi-site collaboration, Dr. Greenberg and his colleague H. Andrew Schwartz of Stony Brook University will use big data and machine learning to understand the link between music and mental health statuses. They were just awarded a $50,000 start-up bid for the project.

Town and Gown Meet

• The website One World One Song, which Dr. Greenberg is developing and leading, aims to combine grass roots social programs on the ground with cutting-edge social neuroscience and big data in order to build empathy and community with music. This large-scale collaboration involves researchers from universities across the world, including Bar-Ilan, Hebrew U, University of Haifa, University of California at Berkeley, Yale, Cambridge, Stanford, University of Pennsylvania, University of Chicago, University of Oregon, Stony Brook University, University of Oslo, and Lausanne University.
• In Israel this February/March 2021, at TEDxRamatAviv, Dr. Greenberg will be speaking about the power of music through social neuroscience and big data. He was confirmed only after several rounds of applications.

Dr. Greenberg is only in his first year of the Zuckerman STEM Leadership Program. We’re looking forward to seeing what’s next!